Announced back in May 2018, NetApp ONTAP 9.4 has officially entered General Availability (GA). It is now available for download at support.netapp.com. ONTAP 9.4 is a data management software designed for cloud-based enterprise all flash systems. Touted as a non-disruptive upgrade ONTAP 9.4 provides new business capabilities in three main categories: new intelligent cloud services with FabricPool; fast all-flash performance with enterprise end-to-end NVMe support; as well as efficient and secure enterprise storage.
FabricPool, NetApp’s automated cloud tiering solutions, was first released last year as part of ONTAP 9.2. 9.4 brings significant new improvements including:
- Tiering of inactive data from the primary storage to the cloud with savings of up to 50% in primary memory usage
- Tiering of inactive data from the secondary storage to the cloud
- ONTAP SELECT support
- Inactive data reporting to give you a heads-up on what you could be saving
- Support for Microsoft Azure in addition to existing Amazon S3 and NetApp StorageGRID® options
9.4 adds support for 30TB SSDs as well as new key security features:
- Secure purge to cryptographically destroy data for data spillage or GDPR requirements
- Protected controller reboot with passphrase lock of the Onboard Key Manager
- Upgrade image validation to ensure that signed copies of ONTAP are being used
- UEFI secure boot on next-generation platforms
Concurrent with the ONTAP 9.4 announcement back in May, NetApp is offering what it refers to as the first available end-to-end NVMe over fibre channel enterprise platform, the AFF A800. In addition to NVMe solid state drives, the A800 offers both 32Gb Fibre Channel and 100GbE Ethernet. 48 high-capacity SSDs fit in a single 4U chassis. NetApp reports average capacity savings of 4.72:1 counting only deduplication, compression, compaction, and clones. That shoots up to 22:1 when they include snapshots. The array states a latency under 200μs and read throughput of a whopping 300GB/s.
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